Following the trends of today’s digital age, social media marketing allows businesses to create brand awareness without resorting to hard-selling tactics.

One of the simplest and most-effective ways to do this is by posting engaging, valuable, consistent content. Good content marketing entices people before selling to them. This then opens the door to providing the guidance necessary for an audience to make thoughtful consumer decisions.

Get StartedSharing content via your social media platforms is the quickest and easiest way to get started with content marketing. You will begin to build customer relationships, help your business show subject matter expertise and gain trust from prospective clients.

If you publish content at regular intervals, you give your followers the chance to ‘check-in’ with your brand.Selective offers a library of free content on social.selective.com to get you and your business started. Click on business, flood, home or auto – or search for a particular topic to find informative articles to share easily on your pages.

To share an article you're reading, click on any of the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social logos on the left of the screen. A pop-up window will appear with a pre-written post for you to easily share. You can edit some parts of the post to better explain why you found the article to be important, but do not delete the URL of the article, as you want to guide others to read your shared post.

Creating content for social mediaIf you decide to create your own content, you can post it directly on your website or blog, and then share it on your social media profiles.

Here are some quick ways to gather topics for content:

Go through your emails. Are customers asking the same kinds of questions over and over? Post content to your site that covers everything they need to know about the topic.

Tie in your content to current events to make your posts both seasonal and topical.

Read the comments section of your blog or on the insurance blogs you follow. Sometimes the best ideas come from what people are talking about below the content.

Tie in pop culture, if it's relevant. Did someone in the media make an outrageous insurance claim? Comment on it and use that as a lead-in for an informative piece.

Once you have some engaging content posted on your blog, use your social sharing buttons to post the link on all of your social channels. Now you're marketing your own, original content!

You don't have to be the true author of your content. Online services like Sprinklr, Newscred, and Crowd Content can provide shareable content, or have a writer create it for you. Just ensure that the content is approved by you and represents you and your brand.